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UNITY OF TONE
UNITY OF TONE UNITY OF TONE MANY of my readers will, I am sure, have taken exception to this or that generalization laid down as fundamental to a sound story technique They will have had in mind certain fine stories which violate the unities of action, time, or place, or commit other artistic misdemeanors, and are nevertheless vital and effective pieces of writing, superior to academic rules and precepts. Yet our generalizations are sound in the main; safe guides for the writer who is learning his craft, and the exceptions themselves obey a higher law which we have now to define. "Unity of Tone" is the term employed to designate the highest degree of story effectiveness, and some stories which violate an accepted principle of structure possess this compensating virtue. But it is a term which, though critically useful, is vague, and demands careful explanation. By unity of tone is meant a harmony of parts —incidents, characters, speech, place, and emotion—which has as its result singleness of impression. The reader recalls not so much the incidents of the story as the totality of its effect upon him It aroused in him a single dominant emotion—fear, sympathy, kindliness, irony, pessimism, and the like. This it did because all of its energies were directed to that end, the author, dominated by the emotion which he sought to arouse in his readers, selecting his materials with this object in view. This emotional intent of the author may be said to overlay or envelop his simple story purpose, that of recounting action, of picturing character or place, or of conveying an abstract idea. That is to say, if I write a story of action, I select my incidents to make my story interesting and effective; but I am further guided by an emotion which leads me to select a certain kind of incident from the many incidents possible, a kind in harmony with my emotion. I have really two purposes here which I endeavor to harmonize. If I am successful in my attempt to reconcile emotion and selection, there is every chance that my story will be convincing. If I fail, my story will certainly lack "unity of tone" and its resultant "unity of impression. " Let us be more specific to make the point dear. I have, we will say, resolved to write a story of exciting incident, an adventure story. I select appropriate incidents and endeavor to combine them into an effective whole. I feel, however, no great enthusiasm for this sort of thing, much as I may recognize its merits. My temperament is of a different sort. Action that is of interest to me is action which reveals character, not action for its own sake. If I am not in emotional accord with my proposed story the result will be one of two things: either my story will change under my hands and become something different from what I intend, or I may stick to my original purpose and the story become limp and nerveless; more technically, it will lack conviction, my emotion being in opposition to my theme. This discord is at the root of the failure of many a story written by a competent author whose heart was not in his work. The story does not convince; this means more explicitly that the author in his selection of materials was not so guided by an emotion in harmony with his story purpose that he selected always the right incidents; or his story became a mere exercise devoid of enthusiasm, uninteresting to him, and hence, in ways unaccountable, uninteresting to his readers. Scott, Dumas, and Stevenson have written excellent stories of adventure, for they delighted in action. Their stories are of a kind with themselves. We cannot imagine anyone of them writing The Mill on the Floss, or Pride and Prejudice, or The Rise of Silas Lapham, excellent stories but utterly different in kind from Ivanhoe, The Three Musketeers, and Kidnapped. Excellence depends not so much upon the kind of subject selected as upon sincerity and genuineness of interest. Great stories can be written of a dozen different types provided the writer have an enthusiasm for his work, for his interest or lack of it is bound to show—to animate his work, to confuse and perplex it, or, again, to leave it inert and dead. He is fortunate who early finds the kind of thing he can do best, which arouses his genuine interest, and who tries to do nothing else. Unity of tone demands, then, that the emotion of the writer, and thus his purpose, be in harmony with his theme. Emotion is not, of course, sufficient in itself, though essential, for it must be supplemented by good judgment and an adequate technique It is here that our comment can be made definite and helpful, for we deal with nothing so intangible as emotional states, but with definite incidents which we may examine and whose suitability to their purpose we can weigh. Let us consider, as an initial illustration, the rationalized story of the supernatural. The writer here suffers from a conflict of emotions. He realizes that the supernatural is possessed of a powerful appeal and of this he desires to avail himself. He does not, however, believe in the supernatural—in ghosts, or premonitions, or spirit-communications—nor is he able to lend himself in imagination to such a belief. Therefore he devises a situation which is apparently explicable only by recourse to supernatural agencies, and at the end, having wrought his readers to a pitch of superstitious emotion, proceeds to show that all the phenomena are explicable by perfectly natural agencies. In such stories I am conscious always of a distinct disappointment which I believe to be perfectly justified and due to a fault in the writing. The story purporting to deal with the supernatural, I lend myself to it and, in imagination, yield to its conditions. I thus am in accord with its tone. But when in its solution it becomes perfectly rational, I am at a loss, and conscious of being tricked. It is not that I am really a believer in the supernatural, but that I am quite ready to pretend to such a belief as the condition of the story, and in that imaginary belief I take pleasure. The writer has made the mistake of selecting two diverse and incompatible orders of incident, the supernatural and the natural. These will not harmonize, and the result is failure. The great story writers do not make this mistake. Mr. Henry James, who delights in quiet psychological studies, who is rational and free from superstition, nevertheless, in such a story as The Turn of the Screw, lays aside his natural manner and tells his ghost-story, with its horrors and its apparitions, as though it were true. He makes no attempt to rationalize it, for it is frankly in the realm of the inexplicable. So, too, Poe, Maupassant, and Kipling in their stories of the supernatural are never misled to an explanation. I say never, but I recall a story of Kipling in which the ghostly noises are traceable to the wind blowing through a knot-hole or something of the sort. The story is flat, and I recall no other instance in Kipling of a like failure. Fiction is governed by laws of its own. The ghost in Hamlet may not coincide with our scientific conceptions of the universe, but in Hamlet it is true, and we lend our imaginations to it and believe it. The failure of the writer to remain true to the tone which he establishes at the outset of his story is of like kind with the misuse of the supernatural. A tragedy should begin as a tragedy, a comedy in the light manner appropriate to it. In one of Stevenson's letters to Barrie occurs a comment in point: The Little Minister ought to have ended badly; we all know it did; and we are infinitely grateful to you for the grace and good feeling with which you lied about it. If you had told the truth, I for one could never have forgiven you. As you had conceived and written the earlier parts, the truth about the end, though indisputably true to fact, would have been a lie, or what is worse, a discord in art. If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning. Now your book began to end well. You let yourself fall in love with, and fondle, and smile at your puppets. Once you had done that your honor was committed—at the cost of truth to life you were bound to save them. It is the blot on Richard Feverel, for instance, that it begins to end well; and then tricks you and ends ill. But in that case there is worse behind, for the ill-ending does not inherently issue from the plot—the story had, in fact, ended well after the last great interview between Richard and Lucy—and the blind, illogical bullet which smashes all has no more to do between the boards than a fly has to do with the room into whose open window it comes buzzing It might have so happened; it needed not; and unless needs must, we have no right to pain our readers. I have had a heavy case of conscience of the same kind about my Brasfield story. Brasfield—only his name is Hermiston—has a son who is condemned to death; plainly, there is a fine tempting fitness about this; and I meant he was to hang. But now on considering my minor characters, I saw there were five people who would—in a sense, who must—break prison and attempt his rescue. They were capable, hardy folks, too, who might very well succeed. Why should they not then? Why should not young Hermiston escape dear out of the country? and be happy. . . . Stevenson means this. The Little Minister is keyed at the outset to the light romantic manner Character, incident, scene, and dialogue point all to a story of this tone. Yet the theme of the story logically precludes a happy and romantic ending. The hero is, by rights, forced to choose between Babbie and his church. He cannot have both, for they are irreconcilable. To surrender either is to involve tragedy. Barrie elects to keep the tone romantic, in the vein of con and forces his story to a conclusion which we cannot rightly believe. We know it could not really end that way, but we are glad that he chose to have it so, for our affections have been enlisted. Nevertheless, though Barrie has been true to the tone established, the story is badly constructed, for we should not be forced to a position of sympathy and judgment at odds. In The Ordeal of Richard Feverel the converse is true. There is here a discord between the tone established at the outset and that of the termination of the story. By its conditions the story may or may not end tragically, but the high romantic manner of the opening has led us to expect a happy ending. The author has trusted his head, not his heart, in his choice and has forced his story to a logical though not an artistic denouement. His error lay in leading us to anticipate something better. With his con elusion in mind as he began, he should have led us to expect it. The plays of Shakespeare afford numerous examples of tone in harmony with the theme. From the first scene of Hamlet—the time, setting, and emotions of the characters—we are led to anticipate a tragedy involving supernatural elements. From Romeoand Juliet we expect at the outset a romantic tragedy of rapid and exciting action; from Twelfth Night a romantic and sentimental comedy. As You Like It strikes a false note at the outset and does not get into the appropriate tone for a scene or two; in fact, not until the action is transferred to the forest. In selecting incidents appropriate to the action a writer is guided almost solely by the nature of the tone established. In a dashing story of adventure we gaily accept the impossible. The hero may perform prodigies and we never question his ability. Yet in one of Jane Austen's quiet stories we should be startled by anything other than the commonplace. M. Marcel Schwob, in an illuminating passage, discusses this point with reference to Stevenson. The following is a free translation of a part of his comment: The realism of Stevenson is quite irrational, and it is for that reason that it is so powerful. Stevenson regards objects only with the eyes of imagination. No man has a face as large as a ham; the sparkling of the silver buttons of Alan Breck's coat when he leaps aboard the Covenantis highly improbable; the unwavering flames and smoke of the candles in the duel scene of the Master of Ballantrae would be possible only in a laboratory; never would the leprosy resemble the speck of lichen which Keawe discovered on his skin; who can believe that Cassilis, in thePavilion on the Links, could see a man's eyes glisten in the light of the moon, though he was a good many yards distant? I need not speak of an error which Stevenson himself recognized, that by which he made Alison do an impossible thing "She spied the sword, picked it up . . . and thrust it to the hilt into the frozenground. " But these are not in truth errors: they are impressions stronger than reality itself. Often we find in writers the power of enhancing the effect of reality through words alone; I know of no other impressions which without the aid of diction are more vivid than reality. . . . Yet though false to the world of experience as we know it, they are, properly speaking, the quintessence of fact. , . . They create that heightened vigor and vivacity by which beings in the world of books surpass the people whom we know in the world about us. The point would seem to be this: in romance it is permissible to introduce impossible incidents provided the story has wrought the reader to such a pitch that he accepts the incidents as credible. The converse is equally true. If a story has failed to create the necessary emotional condition in the reader it may not introduce incidents perfectly possible but out of harmony with the story. We will not believe such incident; under the conditions of the story it is not credible. Credibility, not possibility, is the test of incident, and credibility depends upon the emotions and the imagination, not upon reasoned judgment. Not Everyone believes this, either writer or reader. Readers there are who scoff at fairy tales, stories of the supernatural, anything, in short, not explicable by the laws of natural science. Such a state of mind argues a defective imagination. A good reader is himself an artist, and without him good writing would be impossible. Like the White Queen, your good reader can believe six impossible things before breakfast— only, before he can do so, it is essential that you work him to a pitch of imagination and emotional response to the story. Mention was made in the chapter upon "Exposition and Preparation" of the surprise stories of 0. Henry. These are in part explicable by the principles of construction there outlined, but as a whole are more readily understood at this point. They may best be explained by analogy, and this to a minor form of prose fiction, the extravaganza. The extravaganza is openly in violation of all probability and possibility. In it the reader takes pleasure in the topsy-turvydom of the natural order of events. He expects not a logical solution of a difficulty but an illogical, and he finds pleasure in being outguessed by the author as to its terms. He is, however, on the alert, like a scout anticipating an ambush, and who is, therefore, not surprised when he stumbles into one. All depends upon the awareness of the reader. In Alice in Wonderland at the outset Alice falls asleep. We then are prepared for the illogical order of dreams, and are not astounded when the White Rabbit begins to talk or when Alice falls to the bottom of the well unhurt. After this anything may happen, for the tone of extravaganza has been set. Events must, however, be hence. forth illogical and absurd, or the tone will be untrue, just as in a realistic story an extravagant circumstance would be false and out of tone. Fairy tales and stories of the supernatural partake (W the impossible in varying degrees. In a story which begins "Once there lived a witch, " it is permissible that cats and dogs speak to us. The tone established permits such deviations from human experience. Incident is selected not for its truth to life but for its suitability to the story. The means whereby the heroine attains happiness may be impossible; yet a perfectly normal incident involving her in unhappiness when the story had promised a brighter conclusion would be worse than this; it would be false art. 0. Henry in his stories masters the tone which permits the unexpected. Usually there is some logical preparation as well, but the main resource is the established tone. By bizarre description, setting, and characterization the writer puts us on the alert for unusual happenings. Coincidence and accident are here permissible, though these in the normal story are taboo. Thus in The Fifth Wheel of the Chariot the missing son is restored to his mother by a chain of coincidences which, in a story of a different tone, we could not accept. All depends upon the degree of realism with which the writer pretends to reflect life. The tone once established, it must be maintained consistently. Savage realism is as untrue to light romance—as incredible therefore—as would be a normal realistic cat in place of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. In the novels of Mr. Howells the light mood of romance or the bizarre incidents of 0. Henry would strike as falsely upon the ear as a discord in music. Unity of tone, involving as it does the harmony of all parts, cannot be here illustrated in each of its aspects. My readers will recall the illustration cited in the chapter upon " Dialogue " as a further case in point. In the passage quoted, Stevenson spoke of his difficulty in pitching the dialogue in The Ebb Tide to the proper key. The problem was this: the narrative is told in the writer's own person, the point of view being that of the author-omniscient; the style, therefore, is that of Stevenson, the finished writer. The characters, however, speak realistically, in another tone, that is. Stevenson felt there was a discord here, one which he could not overcome by reason of the point of view selected. Were the story to be told from the point of view of one of the participants the difficulty might be obviated, but such a point of view would have made impossible the character analysis which the author sought. It was because of such difficulties that Stevenson inclined to the point of view of the actor-narrator, whose matter-of-fact narrative might be brought into accord with the dialogue. There are difficulties here as well, for a bare and restricted style proves uninteresting if long maintained, and the point of view hampers the exposition and the choice of incident. The merit of the method is that it affords opportunity for a consistent narrative tone. A further problem of unity of tone is the matter of appropriate setting. Scene, time of year, time of day, sunshine, rain, or fog are all within the control of the writer. He may select such natural conditions as will harmonize with his story, and influence the reader, through suggestion, to the state of mind essential to a proper acceptance of the story as a whole. The quiet, realistic stories of Jane Austen and Howells demand no unusual settings or conditions. Commonplace surroundings are in keeping with the incidents of the story; the wild and gloomy backgrounds of romantic novelists are unsuited to the theme. So, too, are times more romantic than our own. Therefore, Jane Austen and Mr. Howells write of their own day. The romantic author goes afield in time and place to find circumstances in harmony with his theme, to the days of knighthood, to the wars, to the wild places of the earth; or if he writes of our own day he seeks the romantic aspects of it—the lives and conditions of soldiers, detectives, criminals, and the like. The writer upon the supernatural does not set his story in the middle of Broadway on a sunny afternoon. He seeks mysterious houses, lonely situations, night-time, and other appropriate circumstances. For his love scenes another selects spring-time and outdoor beauty, sunshine and growing things. This is not the invariable procedure, of course, for contrast is always possible; the hero may propose to the heroine on a trolley car in a rainstorm. Whatever its character, the setting should be selected for its probable effect upon the reader; it can never be a matter of indifference. I fancy many readers objecting to this statement. They disdain the artistry which selects its scene, its time of day and year, its characters and dialogue and incident, all deliberately and with the object of effecting a harmony of parts. This is too cold and deliberate a process, say they, and its result is conventionality and usualness. Let us do without artificial aids. The convention of a spring setting for a love scene is old and timeworn. My story will gain in freshness should I discard the convention. In other words, the objection here, as in any sophisticated art, is to obvious artifice. However deliberate may have been the selection of every detail, the effectiveness of the whole is impaired if too openly contrived. The art of it should be concealed; the story must be, seemingly, spontaneous. But the effect of careless frankness and disregard of artistic conventions is a tone of writing in itself. The actor-narrator perhaps remarks: "I am a plain, blunt man, and shall set down the strange occurrences of the night of July 16 exactly as I witnessed therm" This is a transparent attempt to command the reader's credulity, and is as much an artifice as any other tone. When artistically managed, however, the seemingly artless story is highly effective. Kipling and Conrad are successful often in concealing their artistry, and thus achieve convincingness. Conrad does it some times, like an inexperienced writer, by the hazardous expedient of violating the time order. Kipling, in his earlier stories, by a journalistic method, by incorporating a good deal of corroborative detail, by suggestion—relating the story to incidents precedent, collateral, and subsequent, and by an avoidance of the familiar devices of the story-teller—contrives this effect of ease and naturalness. We believe that the author is, as he pretends, a mere eye-witness, chronicling facts over which he has no control. A tone so established is excellent for some purposes, particularly for stories of impossible or unlikely happenings The businesslike matter-of-factness of the tone inspires credulity in the reader. Many of Stockton's stories achieve this effect admirably, utterly absurd circumstances being told with a gravity of countenance and a realism of detail which silence skepticism. In contrast with this easy, natural, and seemingly, artless tone are many of the stories of Stevenson and Poe. These writers were, perhaps, as consciously artistic as any in our literature, and at times their artistry is only too apparent. I have cited from their works again and again, for they illustrate to the best advantage nearly every point of story technique. Yet it is undeniable that the reader, though admiring the art, is not always carried away by the story. The consciousness that the story is a thing apart is dominant, and the reader does not give himself absolutely to it; his imagination does not sweep him to complete surrender. In so far as this is true the stories of Poe and Stevenson—and Hawthorne as well—fall short of the highest art which conceals itself. The extreme of naturalness in tone may be illustrated by stories written after the manner of Nevinson's Slum Stories of London. In these the structural principle that no incident should be introduced which does not contribute to the progress of the story, to the development of plot, is deliberately violated. A situation is constructed which leads us to expect a logical conclusion there from. Yet the preparation so carefully contrived leads to nothing. The story fails to realize its promise; characters introduced at the beginning, who should by all the laws of conventional structure reappear to round off the situation, are never seen again. The effect is of perfect casualness; that of life itself, which prepares a situation and then neglects to develop it. Life is filled with such unfinished stories. All of us have had experience of them and have been disappointed when the characters necessary for their completion have dropped from sight, never to reappear; death and circumstance intrude upon our expectation of what is fit and appropriate. Life is in artistic; yet to convey a sense of life's incompleteness and inadequacy is in itself an artistic effect, if deliberately designed, and such stories as those of Nevinson arouse no thought of an inadequate technique or a lack of skill. An untrained writer might through sheer inability fail to round off his story in accordance with its terms. But the effect upon the reader would then be different. The unfinished ending, if it is to be effective, must appear to be designed and not the result of mischance. The French, who have mastered this seemingly artless type of narrative, call stories of the kind "bits of life. " Their tone is perfectly natural, and the effect that of reality vividly set forth. A high degree of selection is, of course, the basis of this effect, though the reason for that selection is not obvious. It would seem, then, that an author may violate any of the structural conventions which we have so painstakingly set down, provided his story purpose demand it and he pitch his story to the right key. But his violation must be deliberate, for a preconceived effect. If it is not, the story will appear ineffectual and inadequate; his ignorance of his craft will be certain at some place to show. I shall cite as my concluding illustration a story of high artistry which, though it violates certain of the conventional principles of structure, succeeds admirably, as it seems to me, in achieving unity of tone. The story is Stevenson's Will o' the Mill. The action covers the entire lifetime of a man, a theme which we previously declared to be unfitted for a short story. Space is necessary to develop character, and this a short story has not. But though Will o' the Mill is the story of a man's life, there is no attempt made to develop a complex character. The story is concerned with but one of Will's problems, which is this: Is happiness to be won by a life of action or of contemplation? Will is a contemplative character. He never goes far from the mountain valley in which he was born, though from it he looks upon the seaward plain and the cities of men, with all the activities which these suggest. Echoes of life occasionally disturb the quiet valley. An army once passes through and vanishes, never to return. Travelers put up for a time and go their way. Of the life beyond the valley Will knows only by hearsay, and he ponders a bit wistfully what he learns. Of human life near at home he knows little through experience. He is once in love but so placidly that marriage seems to him undesirable, and the girl, though she loves him, marries somebody else. After this he still remains in his valley home and evolves his philosophy of life: that the strangeness of life lies within himself, that adventure is of the spirit, and not to be found among the things of the earth. It is the emphasis upon and constant recurrence of this idea which chiefly unifies the story, though the freedom from specific incident and situation, the unity of place, and the lack of sharp transitions in time all contribute to a unified effect. The narrative and dialogue are pitched to the same key of simplicity. A description of the sea, for a sight of which Will longs, is given, not in the words of the author, but in the simple and artless language of the Miller. So, throughout, simplicity is the key-note, and the tone is uniform. The effect is powerful, partly because of this and partly because of the significance of the theme, which is close to Everyone— the query: What is the end of life, and how shall a man best conduct himself therein? Unity of tone is, to repeat, the chief of all unities, for its purpose is to make upon the reader a single emotional effect. It demands that the emotion of the writer dominate and suffuse his theme, that it be in accord with that theme. It demands that the writer clearly know his purpose before he begins to write, and that he bend all his energies to it. What the tone may be is as various as are the emotions. Category:Atmosphere